Friday, April 25, 2008

For years I've seen the "real-world" word problems and "applied math" activities that dominate Reform classrooms shortchanging kids with autism. Their elaborate scenarios and multi-step directions stymie those with language delays and gaps in worldly knowledge. Their multi-media, multi-sensory, interdisciplinary sprawl is too full of distractions for those who require streamlined, structured learning environments.

Now a new study by Jennifer A. Kaminski, a research scientist at the Center for Cognitive Science at Ohio State, discussed in today's NYTimes, suggests that, for all students, there's such a thing as too much real-world math:

The problem with the real-world examples, Dr. Kaminski said, was that they obscured the underlying math, and students were not able to transfer their knowledge to new problems.

Clever word problems have their virtues, but it would seem that students must also learn what's no longer fashionable to teach: math concepts plain and simple.

About Me

Katharine Beals, PhD, is the author of "Raising a Left-Brain Child in a Right-Brain World: Strategies for Helping Bright, Quirky, Socially Awkward Children to Thrive at Home and at School" (Shambhala/Trumpeter)
Katharine is an educator and the mother of three left-brain children. She has taught math, computer science, social studies, expository writing, linguistics, and English as a second language to students of all ages, both in the U.S. and overseas. She is also the architect of the GrammarTrainer, a linguistic software program for language impaired children.
She is currently a lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education and an adjunct professor at the Drexel University School of Education.

Left-brain, right-brain, and brain hemispheres

This site uses left-brain and right-brainnot as physiological terms for the actual left and right hemispheres of the brain, but as they are employed in the everyday vernacular. They appear here in the same spirit in which people use type A and type B (themselves the relics of a debunked theory about blood type and character type): an informal shorthand for certain bundles of personality traits.